Animal Fur & Hair

[Anonymous]

I am working on a bear that has a lot of fur. I used XGen groomable splines for the fur but need longer hair on the bear. It's a pretty big model and of course has the curvature you'd expect from a bear body. I'm trying to figure out the best way to do the hair. Of course, it needs to be dynamic for animation. But do i really have to place each individual guide and shape each one one by one? Seems pretty tedious and somewhat innaccurate. Isn't there a faster, more accurate, and more dynamic way of doing this? If you've used SHave & A Haircut, it would be similar to setting the bear body as a collision mesh, and running a dynamic sim so that the hair just falls to the body without penetrating it. 

Any suggestions or help please? 

[pshwayka]

If I had one wish for a feature improvement in Maya, it would be for a grooming system for nHair (like shave.) Believe it or not, I have had success by importing models into Blender, creating a hair system, grooming it, and then exporting the hair curves with an addon called export_curves.py.  (The plugin saves the curves to a Maya ascii file.)  Back in Maya, you can select the curves and apply a hair system to them.  I call it the "poor man's Shave and a Haircut."  

If you get desperate and feel adventurous, I can give you more info on the process...

[santd]

Hello Mark,

Thank you for posting to the Area.

Groomable splines do have a Length Attribute which can be painted or adjusted using a slider. However, as you stated no dynamics.

With the guides there are ways to simplify the process of creating them. You can duplicate from one side to the other, you can copy and paste them.

One option that may work best for you is to create a hair system and then convert the curves to guides. All of these options exist in the Utilities tab along with others that will help speed up this process.

I hope that information is helpful.

Cheers,